26268: Haiti Progres (news) This Week In Haiti 23:27 9/14/05 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Haïti Progrès <editor@haiti-progres.com>

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
newsweekly. For the complete edition with other news in French
and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-434-8100,
(fax) 718-434-5551 or e-mail at editor@haitiprogres.com.
Also visit our website at <www.haitiprogres.com>.

                           HAITI PROGRES"
                  Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                     September 14 - 20, 2005
                          Vol. 23, No. 27



TWO JOURNALISTS ARRESTED AND RELEASED

Haitian police arrested a U.S. journalist and his Haitian colleague on
Sep. 9 at St. Claire's Church in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince
but then released them without charges on Sep. 12.

Kevin Pina, a filmmaker and correspondent for the Pacifica Radio Network
's "Flashpoints" program at KPFA in San Francisco, was arrested on
orders from Judge Jean Paul Peres, who claimed that Pina had shown him
"disrespect" at the scene and resisted arrest.

Jean Ristil, a free-lance reporter who collaborates with Pina's news
agency, the Haiti Information Project, was also arrested when
photographing Pina's arrest. Both men were held at the Delmas 33 police
station over the weekend.

The journalists were covering a police search of the church, presided
over by Father Gérard Jean-Juste, who has been imprisoned without
charges since July 21 (see HaVti ProgrPs, Vol. 23, No. 20, 7/27/2005).

"We had received an anonymous tip that the police were going to Father
Jean-Juste's residence in order to plant guns," Pina told HaVti ProgrPs.
"When we got there, we didn't know that the police or Judge Jean-Paul
Peres were inside. When I walked into the rectory and identified myself
as a journalist, the judge called me a terrorist and a "blan bandi"
[foreign bandit], to which I took umbrage and identified myself again.
He claims I hit him. That's an absolute lie, a bald-faced lie. He also
claims that I insulted him inside. If there was any insult, it was
because he was trying to impede me from doing my work as a journalist."

Pina said that Peres's arrest of him and Ristil was "politically
motivated" and that he "should resign as a judge."

"Peres works closely with the [former opposition front] Group of 184 and
was hand-picked by [former de facto Justice Minister] Bernard Gousse to
be his successor for an organization of judges called ANAMAH [National
Association of Haitian Magistrates], which is funded by the
International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) and U.S. AID,"
Pina said. Moreover, Haiti's current judiciary "is not independent of
politics" but is rather "the most highly politicized judiciary in
Haitian history."

Pina said that the conditions in the jail where he and Ristil were held
were "awful, just awful" and some of the policemen dispensed treatment
that was "bordering on cruel."

Ristil was released by the judge in the morning of Sep. 12, and Pina had
to endure "three and a half hours of ridiculous questioning" by the
judge, in which Peres was "obviously lying" and "tried to get me to
incriminate myself."

"But in the end he capitulated because he knew that the arrest had no
just cause but was politically motivated and arbitrary," Pina concluded.

SEP. 23 INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL ON HAITI IN DC:
THE CRIMINALS WILL NOW BE JUDGED

For three years, Washington, Paris and Ottawa working with Haiti's
ruling elite, former soldiers and death-squad leaders carried out a
destabilization campaign culminating in the February 29, 2004 kidnapping
and overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

To quell resistance to the coup, armies from the U.S., France, Canada
and the United Nations have occupied Haiti and carried out or aided the
Haitian police in massacres of thousands of Haitian citizens, including
women, children and infants. Hundreds more have been jailed without
trial.

It is time that the criminals be judged.

A coalition of Haiti solidarity groups, supported by the Latin America
Solidarity Coalition, have banded together to organize an International
Tribunal on Haiti, which will hold its first session on September 23,
2005 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at George Washington University in
Washington, DC, the evening before the major September 24th anti-war
march.

WHAT WILL THE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL ON HAITI DO?

At the Tribunal's opening session, prosecutors will present a detailed
background of the coup and preliminary indictments. The background will
cover the pre-coup period when the National Endowment for Democracy and
the International Republican Institute were training Tonton Macoutes and
paramilitary thugs whose violence set the scene for Aristide's
overthrow. The actions of the U.S., French and Canadian governments to
destabilize the Aristide government will be exposed.

The Tribunal will also expose, through eye-witness and expert testimony,
the truth about the daily slaughter being carried out by masked
policemen with the criminal complicity, and increasingly participation,
of the U.N. occupation force. (Since June, the U.N. is in charge of the
Haitian police.) In the end, the Tribunal will forward individual
indictments for those directly responsible for the massacres and crimes
against humanity to the new International Criminal Court (ICC) in The
Hague.

The first session of the International Tribunal on Haiti will begin a
seven-month campaign to expose the human rights violations by the
Brazilian-led "peacekeeping force" and the de facto government put in
place by the Bush administration.

A blue-ribbon Commission of Inquiry, led by former Attorney General
Ramsey Clark, will be announced at the Sept. 23 session of the Tribunal.
A Commission delegation will travel to Haiti in early October to gather
eye-witness testimony and to determine what commanders and officials
were responsible for which massacres and other crimes.

BUSES FROM NEW YORK CITY

Round-trip bus fare from New York and New Jersey to the Tribunal is only
$10. Buses will be leaving at 12 noon from the following locations:
Brooklyn at Grand Army Plaza (Flatbush & Eastern Parkway); Queens at
Duch Travel, Linden Boulevard & 221st Street; Irvington, NJ at Nye
Avenue, corner Springfield & Stuyvesant. For tickets, flyers or more
info, contact: A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition (212) 533-0417, Fanm Lakay (718)
512-5173, HaVti ProgrPs (718) 434-8100, International Action Center
(212) 633-6646, KAKOLA (718) 629-4050, Nicaragua Network (202) 544-9355.
Tickets are also available at: (Brooklyn) Diaspo Television (718)
576-2667, Radio Lakay (718) 469-4671, Radio Pa Nou (718) 940-3861
(Queens) Duch Travel (718) 527-8594 (Irvington, NJ) Marché Lacaille
(973) 374-9697

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION REVISITED:
SELECTIONS FROM "AVENGERS OF THE NEW WORLD"
(The second of two articles)

We continue this week with selections from Laurent Dubois' "Avengers of
the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution" (Harvard University
Press, 2004). The last installment covered the period from the August
1791 outbreak of the rebellion to the August 1793 slave emancipation
proclamation in the French colony of St. Domingue.

FROM THE CHAPTER "THE OPENING"

Toussaint Louverture was waiting. Part of the torrent of revolution that
had swept away slavery in Saint-Domingue since 1791, serving under the
command of Jean-François and Biassou, he was by 1793 a powerful and
independent leader in the insurgent camps allied with the Spanish. By
the beginning of 1794 he was still leading his troops against the
[French] Republic in Saint-Domingue...

"I am Toussaint Louverture. My name is perhaps known to you. I have
undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in
Saint-Domingue. I work to bring them into existence. Unite yourselves to
us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause." With these words,
Louverture announced his emergence as an independent political force in
Saint-Domingue. He issued the proclamation on August 29, 1793, the very
day [French commissioner] Léger Félicité Sonthonax abolished slavery
throughout the Northern Province. Although he was calling for liberty,
he was not announcing his alliance with the Republic. Instead, he was
positioning himself against Sonthonax as the true defender of liberty in
Saint-Domingue...

On [April 29, 1794], [French Republican officer] Etienne Laveaux
dispatched a letter to Louverture, inviting him to join the French side.
Louverture accepted. Within a few days he had gone into "open revolt"
against the Spanish. He raised the tricolor flag over GonaVves and put
the parishes of Gros-Morne, Ennery, Marmelade, Plaisance, Dondon, Acul,
and Limbé, all under his command, in the hands of the Republic. Writing
to Laveaux on May 18, Louverture admitted that he had been "led astray
by the enemies of the Republic and of the human race." After the
"avenues of reconciliation" he proposed had been rejected by the French
in mid-1793, "the Spanish offered me their protection and liberty for
all those who would fight for the cause of kings; I accepted their
offer, seeing myself abandoned by the French, my brothers." After many
months, however, he had come to understand that the Spanish aim was to
have the blacks "kill one another to decrease our numbers" so that they
could force the rest "back into their former slavery."

FROM THE CHAPTER "TERRITORY"

Louverture and [General André] Rigaud had been allies since 1794, and
together they had assured the triumph of the Republic in Saint-Domingue
[against incursions by the English and Spanish]. By 1798, between the
two of them, they controlled all the troops and territory of the colony.
Louverture was technically Rigaud's superior, but in fact the latter
continued to rule over the Southern Province and to command his army
independently, as he had since 1793. With the end of the war with the
British and the expulsion of [French commissioner] Hédouville, however,
the relationship between Louverture and Rigaud rapidly soured. Soon the
two were waging a brutal civil war against each other.

The "War of the South," as the conflict is usually called, is often
presented as a racial conflict pitting Louverture's black army against
Rigaud's free-coloreds...

In fact, however, there was quite a bit of diversity on both sides.
There were many free-coloreds and whites who fought with Louverture's
forces during the war, and some of them distinguished themselves for
their ferocity against Rigaud's partisans. And there were also ex-slave
leaders who, disenchanted with Louverture's regime, and particularly
with his close ties to returning white planters, took advantage of the
war to strike out against his regime. In the north, several ex-slave
officers supported Rigaud during uprisings against Louverture, notably
Pierre Michel, who had helped to suppress the Villatte uprising [where
free-coloreds rebelled against Sonthonax] in Le Cap in 1796. In the west
the African-born Lamour Desrances, who controlled mountain areas around
Port-au-Prince, also sided with Rigaud. The war cannot be explained
simply as a conflict between two racial groups...

Since 1794 Louverture had consistently enforced limits on the freedom of
ex-slaves, arguing that such limits were necessary to consolidate and
protect emancipation. It was the responsibility of the "people of
Saint-Domingue," as he declared in November 1798, to work to make the
colony's economy flourish; the "safety of liberty," he explained in
1801, made the rebuilding of the economy of Saint-Domingue "particularly
urgent"... To attract foreign merchants, Saint-Domingue had to produce
and export its traditional commodities [sugar and coffee]. This was not
just an economic necessity; it was also, as Louverture saw it, a matter
of political survival. If they were to have a say in their future, the
people of Saint-Domingue would need the economic autonomy that could
come only from a strong plantation economy. And achieving it would
require stifling the aspirations of former slaves who envisioned a
future beyond the plantations. But for Louverture this was a price worth
paying, as he made abundantly clear in October 1800 by consolidating his
labor regulations into one draconian decree.

Louverture militarized plantation labor, applying the ideals of
discipline and the methods of punishment used in the armed forces to the
colony as a whole. Just as soldiers obeyed their officers, cultivators
must obey their duties, those who failed their plantation labor would be
punished. Just as soldiers had no freedom of movement and could not
leave their units without "the severest punishment," cultivators who
left the plantations without permission would be subject to fines or
imprisonment...

In February 1801 Louverture issued another decree that further limited
the possibilities open to former slaves... Louverture outlawed the sale
of small plots of land under 50 carreaux, or just over three acres. Any
sale of larger plots, furthermore, had to be approved by the local
administrations under his control, who were to monitor how it was used.
The decree made it impossible for relatively poor men and women to
acquire land. There were to be only wealthy landowners and landless
workers, with nothing in between.

FROM THE CHAPTER "THE TREE OF LIBERTY"

"All the chiefs of the rebels have submitted," [French invasion
commanding General Charles Victor Emmanuel] Leclerc boasted to Bonaparte
in early May [1802]. Nevertheless, he explained apologetically, the
"moment" had "not yet arrived" to move onto the second stage of
Bonaparte's plan: the removal of these officers to France. In fact
Leclerc desperately needed these officers, and the troops they brought
with them, to maintain his hold on the colony...

Among those who were still actively fighting the French were the
officers Sans-Souci and Sylla, the latter set up in a camp in an area
called Mapou... Suspecting that Louverture was secretly in contact with
and supportive of the rebel groups led by his former officers, in early
June Leclerc decided to rid the island of this "gilded negro."
"Toussaint is acting in bad faith," wrote Leclerc to Bonaparte on June
6, "just as I expected." The same day, some of Leclerc's officers, using
a clever pretext - that Louverture was needed to work with a local
officer to end acts of banditry that had been taking place in the region
where he lived - enticed him to a meeting and then overcame the general'
s light guard and arrested him. "You are now nothing in Saint-Domingue,"
one of them announced; "give me your sword"... His family - including
his wife Suzanne, his sons Isaac and Placide, and a niece - were also
arrested and sent across the Atlantic with him. As he boarded the ship
to exile at GonaVves, he famously declared: "In overthrowing me, you
have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the trunk of the tree of the
liberty of the blacks; it will grow back from the roots, because they
are deep and numerous."

FROM THE CHAPTER "THOSE WHO DIE"

"Dessalines is coming to the north / come see what he is bringing,"
invites a song recalling the general's final march against the French...
[General Jean-Jacques] Dessalines's magic triumphed in mid-November
1803. Directing a final attack against French positions outside Le Cap
at VertiPres on the eighteenth, Dessalines sat on a stone, holding his
snuffbox, and watched as his troops took the final, crucial hill,
conquering "a country, a nation for his entire race." Finally accepting
defeat, Rochambeau negotiated a surrender. The several thousand
remaining French troops, along with many white residents of Le Cap,
sailed out of the harbor, where they were taken prisoner by waiting
British ships. They left behind them upwards of 50,000 dead, the
majority of the soldiers and sailors sent to the colony since early
1802. Dessalines marched triumphantly into Le Cap Français, which was
soon given a new name: Le Cap HaVtien.

All articles copyrighted Haiti Progres, Inc. REPRINTS ENCOURAGED.
Please credit Haiti Progres.

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